Surprise! Steelworker Featured at DNC Didn’t Work for Bain

I know, it’s hard to believe the same folks who who pawn off “Republican” women in a pro-Obama ad would be so duplicitous as to trot out a fake at the DNC. Amazing how quickly the so-called “fact-checkers” pointed this out, huh?

So in less than one hour they had a fake Bain employee and a fake Indian. Nice work, folks! Hey, maybe they can bring out Joe Soptic tonight just for shits and giggle.

The Democratic National Convention on Wednesday featured three speakers billed as “former employees of companies controlled by Bain Capital.”

They each told compelling stories about jobs lost, allegedly because of the actions of Bain under Romney’s leadership.

But it turns out one of those employees never actually worked for a company controlled by Bain Capital.

David Foster was supposedly one of those former employees on the convention schedule. He told the story about 750 steelworkers who lost their jobs when the Bain-controlled company GST steel filed for bankruptcy in the early 1990s.

“In 2001, with GST bankrupt and Romney still CEO of Bain, I stood in front of hundreds of steelworkers in their 50s and 60s, and retirees in their 70s and 80s, and told them Romney and Bain had broken their promises. Jobs, vacation pay, severance, health insurance and pension benefits that were promised — they were all gone,” he said.

But Foster, according to a former spokesman for GST Steel, never actually worked for the company.

“David Foster was never an employee of GST Steel’s Kansas City plant. He was employed by the United Steelworkers of America as their regional union director to represent GST Steel, but was not employed at our facility,” according to BC Huselton, who was head of HR at GST.

Instead, Foster was a union organizer, who negotiated for workers that did work for the company.

The actual relevant portions of the DNC web-site are:
“David Foster
Former employee at a Company controlled by Romney’s Bain Capital
2012 Democratic National Convention
Wednesday, September 5, 2012

I’m David Foster, and I was a steelworker for 31 years. For 15 years, I laid brick and tapped the furnaces, and did all that hard, dirty work that turned molten metal into the cars and bridges and buildings that make America what it is today.

I also led the steelworkers in the upper Midwest, including GST Steel in Kansas City, a 100-year old company bought by Mitt Romney and his partners at Bain Capital in 1993. It’s a story that I wish didn’t have to be told, but America needs to know the truth.”

Foster does not actually say he worked for Bain or GST. The headline does, but not Foster’s apparent words, which while a bit weaselish, are not an out and out lie. he says he “led” the GST workers, not that he worked there.

So I think we can call the DNC a pack of liars, but not necessarily Foster.

But it does not matter when a Democrat lies. Because they’re the Good Guys, you see. They stand for peace, and caring for the poor, and protecting the environment. So things like lying and stuffing ballot boxes, and inconsequential stuff like, you know, rapes and frauds don’t count when the Democrats do them. That’s just ordinary human foibles.

One of these days one or two of them are going to wake up and realize that if they lie constantly and commit other crimes, no matter what they believe, that actually makes them the Bad Guys.

I guess we’ll never hear from a union representative who concedes that the total cost of production plus a reasonable profit, exceeded total revenue produced by their labor. And, we’ll also never have the satisfaction of knowing the audience hearing the message is smart enough to recognize the real problem: Union demands for compensation, uncoupled from productivity, is the agent that sent jobs to low wage nations. Management is given a difficult decision to make and then demonized for making the right one.